Ammonite Planets (Omnibus): Ammonite Galaxy #1-3 (95 page)

“No.”

“No?”

“I am the ticket collector, but I am no longer the man who sells tickets.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly what it says.” The portly ticket collector spread his hands apart, appealing to the Xianthan audience. They applauded him and he gave a beatific smile.

“Perhaps we should begin again. Your name is the man who sells tickets?”

“My name was the man who sells tickets. It is now the man who watched the alien ship.” There was more applause in the auditorium and the man gave a wave back, acknowledging it.

“You are the man who watched the alien ship.”

“Exactly, newly decachrome, at your service, Sir.”

“But you sell the tickets at the Xianthe.”

“Certainly. As I already said, I am the ticket collector, which is a many-faceted job. I not only collect tickets, but I am also authorized to sell them.”

“Yes, well … perhaps you could tell us exactly what happened on the day in question?”

“Certainly, sir, it will be my pleasure. On that day, I was the ticket collector, and also the man who sold tickets, and I was still nonachrome. I saw the two defunct Sellites,” He closed his eyes in what the Sellite investigator mistakenly took to be a mark of respect.

“Your courtesy to our fellow-nationals is appreciated,” replied the investigator.

The ticket collector looked confused, but inclined his rather bulging neck anyway. “The two men bought three tickets, and asked for a wheelchair, as they were taking their dear cousin up the Xianthe. She had apparently been injured in a very bad space-shuttle accident, and was unable to walk. They borrowed the wheelchair we have available, and I saw one of them go past my cabin with a person covered from head to foot in a blanket. I assumed that this person was feeling cold.” He looked at the audience. “Sick people often seem to feel cold, you know!” They applauded him again, and he looked most gratified.

“But they disappeared. The cage came back down, completely intact, and with no signs of abuse.”

“What happened later?”

“The following cages all saw the two burned corpses at the Lightning Platform stop, and it took all the next day to cut them loose and clean up the platform. We had to close for the whole day!” The audience booed at this point.

“Was the cage gate still open when you reached the lightning platform?”

“Well, of course it was! There were … organic remains stuck in the bars. It was impossible to close until every scrap of the … organic remains had been scraped off. A very unpleasant job, let me say.” He stared out into the audience. “And it was dangerous! We could have been struck by lightning at any time ourselves!” He stopped long enough to give the audience time to give him another smattering of applause. “Although we provided ourselves with lightning suits, of course, so a strike would not have been lethal.” Here whoops came from the audience, and the investigator was forced to threaten to clear the auditorium.

“Please!” hissed Six. “Please, please, please!”

“Why don’t you leave if you hate it so much?” demanded Diva, who was getting more than irritated with him.

Six opened his eyes wide. “And miss the end? Certainly not! Anyway, I bet they take colours off you if you sneak out of big events like this. I am not risking it. Surely they can’t go on for much longer?”

But apparently, they could. It was two further hours before a verdict was reached. The Sellite commission declared the deaths of two of their subjects an accident, refusing to accept possible communication with any pseudo-horses as evidence, and therefore refusing to accept the attempt at Grace’s murder as such.

Grace, who was still watching the proceedings from the tridiscreen, let her head fall back on her pillows. Predictable, she thought. The Sellites had chosen to ignore all the events leading up to their death, and had only centred their decision on the actual cause of death, which was undeniably an accident. Any hopes she might have had of the true events being accepted by the Sellites died there. She pushed the predis button morosely. It was just one more example of the Sellite way of life. She felt she didn’t want to have any more to do with them. She lay back and let her eyes slowly close. There was nothing she could do about it – that was for sure. She let herself slip into a healing sleep.

THE DOOR OF her room opened rather stealthily, and Grace lifted her head from the pillow to see who had come to visit. She rather hoped that Vion and his wife would have managed a non-virtual visit. She had heard that they might be amongst the visiting Sellite dignitaries. Grace quite liked Vion’s wife, Mercy. Within the constricted Sellite social mores, she would almost pass for a radical! Mercy and Vion really did suit each other, Grace thought – in a way that she herself never could have. Vion too was a radical as far as Valhai was concerned, but he was still a Sellite, still had the Sellite genetic manipulation that he could never completely ignore. Grace was smiling to herself as the door opened. She would never, ever be able to forget those electrifying moments of intense attraction. She would always have a very soft spot in her heart for Vion, even if a long-term relationship hadn’t, in the end, proved realistic. Her eyes were shining with delight as the door opened.

“Vion, I am—” But that was as far as she got, because it wasn’t Vion standing there; it was Amanita. For a long moment only the sound of the vacuum pumps could be heard. Then Amanita came up to the bed, and Grace found herself flinching back against the pillow. She had never felt so defenseless as at this moment, with both hands and her feet attached to the pumps. For once, she was completely at this woman’s mercy, and her heart had already anticipated this by leaping into her throat. Grace swallowed, and looked helplessly around her. There would be nobody to hear her if she called, and with the pumps fitted again after her testimony she couldn’t reach the bell push to summon help.

Amanita seemed to follow all these frantic thought processes, because she smiled. “No-one need ever know,” she said with a falsely pleasant voice which sent Grace’s sympathetic nervous system into overdrive. Amanita looked slowly around the room, taking in all the apparatus, and then fixing her eyes on a drip with the very strong pain-killer Grace had been needing almost every night. The widow stood up and went to investigate the name on the drip.

“You should have studied house management, you know,” she said conversationally, as she dragged the drip over towards Grace. “you would have learned all sorts of interesting things, like what the correct dosage of pain management should be. They teach us never, ever to go above 20 microcubits of Trenexadine per 1000 in drips, you know. Anything over that could be – most unfortunately – lethal. It is one of the first things you learn on the home first aid course.”

Grace made an effort to struggle up the bed, trying to tear the vacuum pumps off her extremities by pulling, but it was to no avail. In the end, she gave up the attempt, finding the blinding pain which ensued impossible to endure. It was a solid black wall, which blocked her mind from dominating her body, leaving her gasping and unable to escape.

Amanita laughed. “I won’t risk myself, you know. This is just a happy coincidence. I never expected to be able to slip away, or that I would find you unattended. The last thing I want is for them to take me away from my children. Xenon 50 and Genna will need me more than ever now. Without me the 256th house will sink for good, and your orthogel entity will get the whole block.” She fixed Grace with a stony stare. “And that will be over my dead body.” As she spoke she finished changing the drips going into Grace’s arm, holding her own left arm across the upper part of Grace’s body so that she wouldn’t struggle any more.

“There! Are you more comfortable now?” The widow put the rest of her weight on Grace’s chest, making it hard for her to breathe. “Won’t be long. Just a few minutes, while the painkiller spreads out into the rest of the drip. Then you will soon be falling asleep. So nice for you, don’t you think? I can see you are in a lot of pain. What a pity that one of the nurses made a mistake, isn’t it?”

Grace felt her body fighting against the feeling of sleepiness, but it was threatening to blot out the world, and she eventually knew that she had to welcome it, welcome the lack of pain and the numbing peace that was slowly creeping over her. As she felt her unwilling body begin to relax she vaguely heard her sister-in-law continuing her discourse.

“—Because we wouldn’t want anybody to find out what I had done, would we? That wouldn’t be at all clever. And, you see, I am very clever – so much more so than my dear departed husband, may Almagest watch over him. I told him not to hang our house’s fortunes on Atheron, but would he listen?” She leant forward to check that the drip was functioning correctly, giving it a small prod of encouragement.

“If he had he would still be alive. Even though, in the end it was all your fault, you know. You thought I would come here screaming at you, didn’t you?” She gave a little giggle. “But I know better now. It is not the right way. I have been wrong. If I show aggression they will suspect – but if I am simply a grieving widow? Well, then I will get sympathy, won’t I? Today has turned out to be a good day, after all. A very good day.”

Grace struggled one final time as she felt her limbs get heavy. Amanita noticed, and the pressure on Grace’s chest lifted as the woman straightened up. Over lids which she could barely keep open she saw her sister-in-law slip lightly towards the door of the room. As she went out, Amanita put a finger to her lips in the universal sign of silence, smiled with satisfaction, and then left. Grace let her eyelids sink into the darkness of her mind, and almost welcomed the pain-free world she was entering into. 

THE VISITOR AND Arcan were in a meeting with the Xianthans, who were almost as dissatisfied with the way the investigation had gone as they were.

The canth keeper was explaining what had already been done to find Atheron’s encampment, and the grave difficulties they were having in getting the information out of the Xianthan collaborators. Six and Diva had excused themselves, because they had a prenatal appointment with the man who contrived children, and it had already been put off three times. Ledin and Grace’s mother were on the tridi to Kwaide, where it seemed that both their presences would be required very shortly; there was a crisis involving some of the Elders and the sycophants.

“Since we have to travel with canths in the lowlands, our progress leaves much to be desired,” the Xianthan was telling them. “but we are now confident that we have pinpointed the exact spot the two Sellites were using. For some time, it seems, there have been—”

But just what there had been was destined to remain unknown, because at that moment the man who spoke to canths broke off with a wince of pain, and several things all happened at once.

The visitor’s video camera gave a screech of surprise and swiveled its lens rapidly to Arcan. Arcan turned almost completely black, and a ball of some sort of material appeared in front of them all, where it wavered for a second, flashed in and out of existence, and then disappeared again.

Arcan recovered some of his colour, and then encompassed the man who talked to canths and the visitor in his diaphanous shape, transporting them both to Grace’s room in the hospital building. They had all realized at the same time that something was desperately wrong with Grace, they could feel it right through all of their very different bodies, and Grace’s canth was dying.

Once in the room, the canth keeper jabbed urgently at the call button, and then, while waiting, looked hopelessly around the room. Something was wrong, but he couldn’t tell exactly what it was.

Arcan tried to get inside his friend’s mind, but found it so comatose that he was unable to penetrate. At least that brief incursion told him something.
 

“She has been drugged!” He bellowed into the mind of the man who talked to canths, who put his hands to his head in response to the volume.

The visitor caught sight of the drip. “That is the night drip!” it exclaimed. “I noticed it particularly the other day. We have to detach it from her arm. Quickly!”

The Xianthan tore at the tube, in the end pulling the whole thing out of the sleeping girl’s arm. “Now what?” he shouted.

But by then the nurses were on hand, and one of the doctors came running into the room. The head nurse examined the drip and the vial Amanita had let fall to the floor, and was able to tell them how much of an overdose she had been given. They began working to save her life.

The visitor gave a whirr. “We should tell Cimma and Ledin,” it suggested.
 

Arcan gave a nod, but didn’t make a move until the visitor buzzed again.
 

“And Diva and Six. You will have to bring them here!”

The orthogel entity shimmered as he realized that he was the one who needed to act, and he transported all four of the missing friends directly to the hospital room, where their eyes widened with horror as they saw what had happened to Grace. They all stood where Arcan placed them, their minds needing more time to cope with such a sudden change, needing time to assimilate all the new facts. Once they did, though, there was no silence.

“Who did this?” asked Six grimly.

“It must have been a nurse,” hazarded Cimma, “though they all seem very efficient. I shouldn’t have thought—”

The head nurse looked up at that and shook her head. “No. There is no possibility of this being malpractice. The whole vial was torn open to make sure the full contents dispersed into the drip. No nurse of mine would do such a thing!”

Ledin frowned. “Are there any cameras recording who comes in and out?”

The nurse seemed surprised. “No. There has never been the least necessity here on Xiantha to install such security measures. I should have been here myself, but I was escorting the Sellite visitors around our installations.”

Six looked up at that. “The Sellite visitors? Was there a thin woman with them? Dressed in black?”

The head nurse shook her head. “No. Why? Is it important?”

Ledin made a sign to Six. “Not really, no. There is nothing to worry about. I’m sure this was just a mistake.”

Six opened his mouth. “But—”

Ledin stepped on his foot. “—But we would like to say how pleased we are with the attention our friend has received here.”
 

Six fell silent, and they all stood back to let the medical team attend to Grace. The canth keeper waved his hands in the air, and lowered his voice to a whisper.

“You think it was the widow?”

“Who else?” said Six bitterly. “She saw her chance, and took it. How could we have left Grace alone when that woman was on the planet? We might have known she would do something abysmal.”

“We should have known,” said Diva. “This is all our fault.”

Cimma shook her gently by the arm. “It is NOT our fault. It is very much Amanita’s fault, and I hope she pays for it.”

The Xianthan turned to Ledin. “Why did you stop Six from denouncing the woman?”

“It would have been pointless,” said Ledin. “You saw this morning how the Sellites refuse to accept evidence unless it is corroborated by several witnesses. Why, even then they throw more than half of it out! What is the point of accusing a woman when it would be mere speculation? We would get nowhere! It will be better to let her think she has got away with her crime, and catch her doing something later.”

Six nodded. “You’re right!” he said. “But if Grace dies I withhold the right to take care of the problem by myself.”

Ledin gave him a strange look. “You wouldn’t have to,” he said shortly. “I would be there with you. But we can’t start acting like avengers, Six – you know that. We have to stay within the law. Grace wouldn’t thank you for risking your freedom just to get even with a criminal.”

Six muttered a reluctant agreement. “I suppose you are right.”
 

“Let’s just hope she gets over this,” said Ledin, looking back to the bed with eyes which didn’t seem able to focus quite correctly. “And if she does – somebody should be with her all the time. At least while the Sellite delegation is here on Xiantha!”

“Either Diva or I will stay with her,” said Cimma. “The rest of you can go back to working on finding Atheron’s facility. There is no point in all of us being with Grace, however much we might want to. We simply don’t have the time to spare. We have to get that installation, and the men who work in it, under our control before any bright spark thinks to step in and take over the leadership!”

Ledin and Six both pulled faces at that, but the arguments were convincing. They eventually nodded reluctantly, but insisted on waiting for the doctor’s preliminary prognosis.

This was thirty agonizing minutes later. The silence had become thick to all of them long before the doctor came back to give his report.